


Thirteenth Night

by TempleCloud



Series: Journey to Camelot [1]
Category: Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: Anachronistic, Forgiveness, Gen, Insomnia, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:20:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25798825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Summary: Malvolio's position as Olivia's steward has become unbearable, and there is nothing for it but to set off in search of a new life.  But old acquaintances keep straying into his path...
Series: Journey to Camelot [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1871695
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	1. Chapter 1

I couldn’t sleep. With the curtains closed, my room was as dark as the dungeon where I’d been locked up, and I seemed to hear Feste earnestly asking me, ‘So, are you _really_ mad, or just pretending to be mad?’ and ‘Sir Topaz’ (who was also Feste, disguising his voice) telling me that I was hallucinating and the room wasn’t dark at all, and that he couldn’t pronounce me cured unless I would agree that people were reincarnated as woodcocks. Worse, I could hear _my_ voice, pleading with Feste to help me, grovelling to him. Worst of all was the memory of the lady Olivia’s face, gazing at me in confused anxiety when I came in grinning like an idiot and prattling about the love-letter I thought she’d sent me – and Olivia again, even gentler and more pitying, when I was released from the dark room, still held in a straitjacket, dirty and degraded and furious, to confront her with the letter, and she explained that she didn’t write it at all, and that someone must have tricked me.

I’d given notice, of course. It would be impossible to go on running the Countess Olivia’s household if everyone was laughing at me. When I’d informed my lady of this, she smiled and said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that! Everyone here’s been behaving rather strangely in the last few weeks, including me, and soon people will forget all about it. But I tell you what: why don’t you take a sabbatical? You haven’t taken any time off in – well, ever, actually, and you deserve it. Take a month’s holiday, and think over what you’re going to do next; and then, if you do decide to come back here, I’d be very glad to have you back; and if you still want to resign, I expect there are jobs going at Orsino’s court, and he could pay you more than I do. But in the meantime, just relax.’

I agreed. I didn’t _want_ a holiday. I wanted a lot of things, including revenge, a grovelling apology from the entire universe, Olivia’s hand in marriage, and, right now, a bath and a shave and some clean clothes. But most of these weren’t achievable right now, so, when I’d at least washed and shaved and changed into fresh clothes, I packed my bags and set off. It wasn’t as though arguing was going to do any good, and perhaps Olivia still secretly thought that I had been temporarily insane and that, now I was getting better, I needed some time to convalesce. So, I booked into the _Elephant_ for the night.

And then, as I said, I couldn’t sleep, in the darkness of the inn bedroom. It was ridiculous. I hadn’t been afraid of the dark since I was six years old. I’ve always believed in sleeping well when I’ve done a good day’s work, and being up bright and early the next morning to make sure everyone else gets up on time as well. (Not that getting any sleep was necessarily feasible with the Countess’s uncle, blasted Sir Toby Belch, and his unspeakable friends, starting an impromptu party in the pantry when they reeled home at whatever time the pubs closed. But I believed in it as an ideal to aspire to, at any rate.)

But now, when I closed my eyes and tried to relax, I could hear Feste taunting me, ‘Now, now, raving like this won’t make you get better; just try to calm down and go to sleep,’ and, before that, Olivia brushing cool fingers against my forehead to see if I’d got a fever, and asking kindly, ‘Do you think you’d better go to bed?’ – which I’d _completely_ misunderstood. On reflection, thinking I had any chance of ending up in bed with Olivia, who was not only my boss but also thirty years younger than me and absolutely gorgeous, really was insane, but it had seemed reasonable enough at the time.

Come to think of it, hearing voices in your head was a sign of madness. What if I really did go mad from delayed shock, now that I was no longer busy trying to prove that I was sane? Perhaps something perverse in me even _wanted_ to go mad, to prove that Feste and Sir Toby and Maria and the rest of that gang had done me a serious wrong and that it couldn’t be dismissed as ‘just a joke’.

Well, in the meantime, I might as well be comfortable. I made my way downstairs, and asked the night-porter how much a candle to last two hours would cost.

‘Oh, they’re free,’ he said. ‘Have a big one to last all night, if you’d rather – just as long as you don’t let it set fire to the room! And if you’re the scholarly type, there’s books and newspapers in the bar. D’you fancy anything to eat or drink? The kitchen’s closed now, but we’ve got some cakes and nuts and biscuits here, and a few bottles of beer...’

I ignored him, took a candle, helped myself to a book, and retired to my room. To my irritation, the book turned out to be a novel, but I didn’t want to go down and speak to the infuriatingly chirpy porter again, so I sat up in bed and read. In fact, as fiction went, it wasn’t too bad: a story about a lonely weaver who leaves his home town after his best friend has falsely accused him of theft and enticed his fiancée away from him, and settles on the edge of a village many miles away. I read until dawn, and then yawned, blew out the candle, stretched out in bed and wrapped the pillow round my head to blot out the frantically chattering sparrows, and slept until lunchtime.

It is horrifyingly easy to let standards slip, and become one of the wastrels who spend their nights carousing in drunken revelry and the next day recovering. Not that I was interested in the carousing side, but this was the first time I’d tried being nocturnal, and it was strangely pleasurable. I wondered whether I ought to be ashamed of myself, but, while I was on holiday, I couldn’t think of any particular reason why I shouldn’t be nocturnal for the time being. It wasn’t as though I had any work I needed to get on with. While I was here, I was a customer, and it was someone else’s job to wait on me.

I had lunch sent up to my room, along with the newspapers so that I could have a look through the job adverts. There wasn’t likely to be much of interest, I knew. It’s difficult applying for a new job when you’re in your fifties, and, since Illyria was in the middle of a recession, there weren’t many jobs going generally. I’d always been very good at interviewing people, and asking the questions they hoped no-one was going to ask, like, ‘Why did you leave your last job – what precisely do you mean by “mutual agreement”?’ ‘Can you tell me about a time when you’ve had conflicts with your colleagues, and how you resolved the issue?’ ‘What would you say are your greatest weaknesses?’ and ‘Have you ever had, or been suspected of having, any of the following illnesses?’ I knew all the evasive answers and what they meant, but I hadn’t the faintest idea how I was going to answer any of those questions now.

The system had been a lot simpler when I was a boy. My uncle, who was butler to the old Count, had promised he could find me a job as a page-boy, as long as I stayed on at school until I was twelve, always got good grades and never got into trouble. I was a sensible child, and I’d always tried my hardest, and by the time I was ten I had become blackboard monitor, collector of dinner-money, and supervisor of the school library (only a couple of shelves of books in the corner of the room, but it was a responsible position, all the same). I knew that it didn’t matter when other children kicked me and called me names in the playground, because they were only peasant children who’d be leaving in a couple of years anyway to earn a few pennies scaring crows or collecting firewood, while I was going to be page to a real Count. And in the meantime, if I was busy spending break-times cleaning the blackboard, counting dinner-money and checking that all the reading-books had been handed back on time, I didn’t have to be in the playground much of the time anyway. The teacher said I ought to try for a scholarship to grammar school, but, with the prospect of a real job lined up, I decided I was ready to move on from formal education.

Of course, the old system of patronage and jobs for life was hopelessly inefficient, leading employers to hire the relatives of current members of staff rather than the best-qualified applicants. Not only that, it encouraged employees to be complacent, assuming that they couldn’t be sacked whether or not they were any good at their jobs. Nobody should expect a job for life as a matter of course. But all the same, after working for the same household for forty years and working my way up to the top, I thought I deserved one.

In fact, when the newspaper arrived I didn’t even read as far as the job adverts, because I was too busy staring at the headline on the front page: ‘Twin Weddings For Orphans Of The Storm’. I recognised nearly everyone in the photograph: Cesario, the effeminate new page-boy whom Duke Orsino had been sending to pester Olivia on a daily basis, holding hands with the Duke himself; and then Olivia, holding hands with another boy who looked very like Cesario, and must have been his brother. Thinking back, I’d seen the other boy before, too, the previous night in Olivia’s house, hugging his brother and sobbing, but I hadn’t paid them any attention at the time. 

But – _weddings_? Olivia hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring when I’d seen her, had she? Had she finally accepted Orsino? But everyone _knew_ she thought he was the most boring man in Illyria, though she’d always tried to be tactful, and made the excuse that, as she was merely a countess, she didn’t think she was good enough to marry a duke. It hadn’t been all that unreasonable to hope that she might marry down, rather than up; aristocrats _do_ sometimes marry their servants, and, if it came to that, Sir Toby had just got married to Maria, if only because they were united in hatred of me. Personally, I couldn’t understand how anyone could want to marry Sir Toby, a man who exists in three states: (a) hungover and obnoxious, (b) drunk and obnoxious, or (c) asleep and almost tolerable; but that was Maria’s problem, not mine.

But if Orsino wasn’t Olivia’s husband, who was? Not the ineffably vacuous Sir Andrew, surely? Or the boy Cesario, who had pushed past me, demanding to speak to ‘the honourable lady of the house – which one is she, by the way?’ The pretty, impertinent brat whom Olivia had made me run after to give him a ring, as if _I_ were the one who was a mere errand-boy? Was he even old enough to be legally married to anyone?

The story below the photograph demonstrated that I had only to be removed from my position for a few days for complete chaos to descend. ‘Cesario’ was, it turned out, a girl called Viola. She and her brother, Sebastian, were illegal immigrants: travellers from Messaline who had been shipwrecked off the coast of Illyria and had managed to swim ashore, though neither of them had known that the other had survived. After that – well, the whole thing was almost too bizarre to be shocking, if only because it was impossible to decide what to be scandalised about first. What kind of hussy disguises herself as a boy, and then brazenly asks for a job at the court of a man she’s never even seen before? What kind of boy gets married on the spur of the moment to a woman whom he’s never met, but who thinks she knows him and has obviously mistaken him for someone else? What kind of woman asks a boy still young enough to be mistaken for his sister to marry her – and isn’t even disappointed when she discovers she’s accidentally married a complete stranger, whose only achievement is to have beaten up her uncle and his friends? Admittedly, it was high time _someone_ taught Sir Toby and Sir Andrew a lesson, and I’m sure they deserved it, but Illyria has quite enough lawless vagabonds of its own without needing to import them – and, now that both Viola and Sebastian were married into the two noblest households in Illyria, there was no chance of sending them back.

The news was too depressing to go on with, so I finished reading the book about the weaver who adopted an orphaned child, and, when I’d finished it, went down to the bar to see whether they had _Paradise Lost_ , which I’ve always meant to read and never quite got round to. They didn’t, so I made do with another novel. This one turned out to be a sort of love story, although in practice most of it was about sheep. This was because it was about a young woman who inherits a farm, and decides to run it by herself, without the aid of a bailiff, and, although both her shepherd and a neighbouring farmer are in love with her, the silly girl becomes infatuated with a fickle soldier. It was fairly obvious that she was going to end up marrying the shepherd, but it was interesting to see the plot winding its way through murder, ruined hay-harvests, elopement, faked suicides, sheep-bloat, illegitimacy, and over-enthusiastic sheepdogs. I hadn’t realised just how many things could go wrong with sheep, but I could see how people became addicted to reading fiction if they didn’t have anything better to do.

There was a folk singer in the bar that evening, who stayed until the small hours of the morning, so I decided to sit up in bed reading as the night before, since I wouldn’t be able to get any sleep anyway. I didn’t need to go down to see who it was; the voice was all too recognisable, and so were most of the songs, which had been in his repertoire for decades: [_Come Away Death_](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+%27come+away+death%27&docid=608016482670805670&mid=A7BAC10B68D909C73E68A7BAC10B68D909C73E68&view=detail&FORM=VIRE), and [_Bottle Of Wine_](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Youtube+%27bottle+of+wine%27+%27Tom+Paxton%27&view=detail&mid=373B674C51EB726D3363373B674C51EB726D3363&FORM=VIRE0&ru=%2fsearch%3fpc%3dCOSP%26ptag%3dN1117D060818AE20BDC3E2E%26form%3dCONMHP%26conlogo%3dCT3210127%26q%3dYoutube%2b%2527bottle%2bof%2bwine%2527%2b%2527Tom%2bPaxton%2527), and [_O Mistress Mine_](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Youtube+%27O+Mistress+Mine%27+%27Twelfth+Night%27&view=detail&mid=F0B4F606A5782E56B966F0B4F606A5782E56B966&FORM=VIRE), and [_The Merryman And The Maid_](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Youtube+%27The+Merryman+and+the+Maid%27+%27The+Yeomen+of+the+Guard%27&docid=608053410728250639&mid=C9AF5D7E013528C985BEC9AF5D7E013528C985BE&view=detail&FORM=VIRE), and [_The Armadillo_](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Youtube+%27The+Armadillo%27+%27Flanders+and+Swann%27&docid=607989029171957754&mid=82ACABC41D40AA8C966682ACABC41D40AA8C9666&view=detail&FORM=VIRE), and [_The Wind And The Rain_](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Youtube+%27O+Mistress+Mine%27+%27Twelfth+Night%27&&view=detail&mid=45F6B89B91369949C65645F6B89B91369949C656&&FORM=VDRVRV), which is the most blatant lie imaginable. Feste isn’t the kind of fool who ever gets turned out into the wind and the rain, unless he decides to go out there just for the fun of it. 

There are genuine fools, who become court fool to a rich patron because they can’t do any other job, who call their master ‘Nuncle’, and, if the master is ruined, will follow him into exile, like a beggar’s dog. Feste is more like a cat: the sort of cat that positively refuses to catch mice, but goes from house to house, knowing that it can always find someone soft-hearted enough to give it a saucer of milk or a plate of fish-heads, and that it can come and go as it pleases, and scratch anyone who doesn’t show it the respect it thinks it deserves. He also probably gets – I can’t say he _earns_ – more money than I do, though it’s impossible to prove this, because everyone gives him money and it doesn’t show up on a wage-slip at the end of each month. The old Count, Olivia’s father, told me that Feste was one of those anomalies you have to work round, and he laughed at me when I pointed out that my job was to rationalise matters and deal with anomalies. 

Right now, the anomaly was explaining that, ‘Some of you might have heard me at the lady Olivia’s court, but she doesn’t need a professional fool right now; she’s got a husband to do the job for free. But still, they say one drink too many makes you a fool, the next makes you a madman, and the third drowns you. So, here’s a song for any lunatics here!’ and he launched into a new song, called [_Mad Tom O’Bedlam_](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Youtube+%27Mad+Tom+o%27Bedlam%27&&view=detail&mid=13B4A4B49237AB3C67EB13B4A4B49237AB3C67EB&&FORM=VRDGAR&ru=%2Fvideos%2Fsearch%3Fq%3DYoutube%2520%2527Mad%2520Tom%2520o%2527Bedlam%2527%26qs%3Dn%26form%3DQBVR%26sp%3D-1%26pq%3Dyoutube%2520%2527mad%2520tom%2520o%2527bedlam%2527%26sc%3D0-26%26sk%3D%26cvid%3DB4C166F4A052449CAA5105B97BACE136).

I didn’t _think_ he was getting at me personally. I couldn’t be sure whether he even knew I was there, though Feste generally seems to know practically everything that’s going on. But if he _was_ trying to provoke me, and I stayed in my room, he’d think I was afraid of him, and if I got angry and stormed down to tell him to shut up, then he’d won. On the other hand, he _had_ rescued me when I was locked up, and I had promised to reward him. Not that he deserved it, of course, but I ought to keep my promises anyway. I made my way downstairs, with an envelope of banknotes, and handed it to Feste. ‘There’s the money I owe you,’ I muttered, trying to sound as casual as possible. ‘Oh – and – thank you.’

‘That’s okay – you’d suffered enough,’ said Feste quietly. ‘Now, why don’t you buy me a drink? With all this singing, I’m as dry as the Egyptian mummy in the Metropolitan Museum.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Cider. Cheers, mate.’

I fetched a pint of cider for Feste and a mineral water for myself. ‘By the way, do you do requests?’ I asked.

‘I might. Why?’

‘Because I’d like to ask you to stop singing. Some of us are trying to sleep.’

‘Okay, just one to finish off with and I’ll call it a night. It’s quite a quiet one anyway. Think of it as a lullaby.’

It was a quiet song, too: a melancholy Irish ballad called [_The Youth Of The Heart_](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Youtube+%27The+Youth+of+the+Heart%27+%27Flanders+and+Swann%27&&view=detail&mid=9783CB294004811CF7F29783CB294004811CF7F2&&FORM=VRDGAR), with a haunting tune. I caught myself humming the chorus as I drifted off to sleep, and slept more peacefully and dreamlessly than I had for a long time.


	2. Chapter 2

I woke up still thinking about the weaver in the story I’d been reading earlier. He was a Puritan, though he’d stopped having anything to do with religion, and stopped trusting either God or people, after being falsely accused of theft. I knew how he felt. I’d stopped going to chapel as a matter of principle, thirty years ago. This was because I’d had a series of arguments with whoever happened to be preaching, on various subjects including how the doctrine of Predestination differed from Muslim belief in Fate, whether Christians should celebrate Christmas, whether women should be allowed to preach, whether music had any place in Christian worship, and whether it was hypocritical to campaign against bear-baiting and dog-fighting but still eat meat. (I can’t remember now which side I was on in some of these arguments: only that I’d felt very strongly about them at the time.) In the end, the pastor had said that if I wasn’t willing to let people finish preaching a sermon before I started criticising it, I’d better not attend chapel at all for a few weeks. I’d told him he was a crypto-Papist who would evidently prefer to preach in Latin so that nobody understood what he was saying and could tell him he was wrong, and walked out, never to return. Since then, I’d been too busy to bother with religion, though people still referred to me as ‘a sort of Puritan’.

But when I looked back, it wasn’t the endless arguments about predestination and Christmas carols and animal rights that were important. What had mattered had been all those sermons about why you must love your enemies and forgive those who persecute you, just as God has forgiven you. At the time, I’d sat through all this talk about grace abounding to the chief of sinners, and wondered why the New Testament didn’t have much to say to those of us who were respectable law-abiding citizens, didn’t need forgiveness, and therefore shouldn’t need to forgive anyone else.

But now, last night, Feste and I seemed to made peace, at least for the time being, and it was oddly reassuring not to have to resent him any more. It’s all very well to storm off, snarling, ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ but in practice, if you have the capacity to antagonise virtually everyone you meet, then getting your own back on everyone who has ever bullied or insulted you can turn into a full-time job – especially as, if you don’t have the resources to kill all your enemies outright, they are likely to want revenge on you for taking revenge on them for taking revenge on you. I wish I’d worked all this out a bit earlier. But on the other hand, being expected to forgive all my enemies (even Sir Toby? Even Maria?) didn’t seem much more feasible.

When I went down to order breakfast, yet another familiar enemy was sitting slumped in one of the armchairs in the bar, with a suitcase at his feet. Sir Andrew was looking even paler and more wrung-out than he usually does; his head was bandaged, his right arm in a sling, and he had an only slightly faded black eye.

‘What’s wrong? Didn’t the new Count want you staying in his house any longer?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t want to stay any longer! I decided to leave as soon as I was well enough to get out of bed. I’m fed up with Illyria, everyone here is completely mad and I haven’t got any friends and I just want to go home!’ He was crying uncontrollably by this point, like a child. ‘Even Toby isn’t my friend, and I thought he was – I mean, he was always borrowing money off me and never paying it back, and you don’t take money off someone who _isn’t_ your friend, do you?’

‘ _I_ wouldn’t borrow money without paying it back,’ I pointed out.

‘No, but then you haven’t got any friends, have you? I mean, you haven’t even got anyone who _pretends_ to like you! But you _still_ thought you were going to marry Olivia and get to boss us all around, didn’t you? _Loser!_ ’

‘You let Sir Toby convince you that _you_ stood a chance with her,’ I pointed out. Doesn’t that make us both equally losers?’

‘Yes – I suppose I should’ve thought of that,’ Sir Andrew admitted. ‘Only Toby said she was pretending to flirt with that kid Cesario just to make me jealous, and that I had to challenge him to a duel to win back her favour. Only it wasn’t Cesario – did you hear, Cesario’s actually a girl called Viola? – but anyway, it wasn’t her, it was her brother, and he’s _dangerous_ , and he _attacked_ Toby and me! He slashed my head open, and I had to have eleven stitches, but I didn’t scream at all!’ he added proudly.

‘ _You_ had eleven stitches without screaming?’

‘Well, you see, I fainted as soon as the doctor came near me with a needle, so it saved time. But the difficult bit was _finding_ a doctor, because the first one they sent for was drunk. It’s not fair – if people like Toby and me are going to get sozzled and start fights, other people ought to stay sober in order to patch us up!’

‘And what do you expect me to do about it?’ I retorted. ‘Draw up binge-drinking rotas so that different people get completely out of their skulls on different nights?’

‘Can I have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday?’

‘Certainly not,’ I said sternly. ‘That’s much too often, and anyway, it isn’t fair if the same people have the same day of the week every week. No, I think an eight-day rota would be fairer, don’t you?’

Sir Andrew stared at me for a moment, trying to work out whether I was serious, and then we both burst out laughing. It was like the sort of ridiculous conversation you have with a small child – which, considering that Sir Andrew seemed to have the emotional maturity of the average six-year-old, was probably fair enough. ‘I didn’t know you _had_ a sense of humour!’ he gasped at last.

‘I didn’t know I did, either. I think you may have awakened it.’

‘Yes, but why are you being – well, almost nice to me?’

This was a good question, under the circumstances. I could think of various sarcastic replies, but in the end I settled for, ‘Well, now that we’re both defeated, there isn’t much point going on being enemies, so we might as well help each other.’

‘We should gang up on Toby for a change – see how _he_ likes it!’ suggested Sir Andrew.

‘We could,’ I agreed. ‘But do you really think it’s worth it? Anyway, I got the impression most of it was Maria’s idea, and if she’s married to Sir Toby, I suppose that’s enough punishment in itself.’

‘“But she’ll regret it! The whole thing’s doomed before they even take their vows!” That was a line from a play I saw once.’

‘And if it comes to that, Sir Toby isn’t going to have an easy life being married to anyone as sharp-tongued as Maria,’ I continued. ‘Perhaps they’re each other’s punishment.’

‘Yes, they’re each other’s punishment. And they don’t want me around any more, anyway. I’m going to send for the rest of my luggage and stay here until I’m well enough to travel, and then I’ll go – oh, somewhere or other. Maybe Italy.’

‘Do you speak Italian?’

‘No, that’s pretty much why I came here. You see, after I’d failed my university entrance exams for the fourth time, my uncle said I ought to go on a gap year until I’d got a bit more sense, and he’d pay me an allowance as long as I didn’t come home. So I decided to start with Illyria because nearly everyone here speaks English, and I don’t speak much of anything else.’

‘Some people would have bought a phrasebook,’ I suggested.

‘I did! It said how to say, “I want a beer,” and, “I want a steak,” and, “I challenge you to a duel,” in a dozen languages, but it didn’t say how to say, “On second thoughts, I don’t want to have a fight with you after all because you’re a lot bigger than me, so please can I buy you a drink?” But anyway, I’ve seen lots of plays set in Italy, and the characters in the plays can all speak English.’

‘Yes, but that’s not the same as real life,’ I pointed out.

‘It might be! How do you know we’re not characters in a play? I met this philosopher once who said that the whole world is a stage, only the author keeps running short of ideas, so he re-uses the same plots over and over, like twins and shipwrecks and girls disguised as boys. I mean, I saw a play once set in Ephesus, or maybe Syracuse, that was _exactly_ like what’s been happening here, only it was about two sets of identical twins who’d been separated at birth, so one of each twin had grown up in Ephesus and the others had grown up in Syracuse. I think Ephesus is in Greece...’

‘No, actually it’s in Asia Minor,’ I corrected him.

‘Right, so Syracuse must be the one that’s in Italy. Or somewhere foreign like that, anyway. I mean, I can’t remember much about the play, I just remember one of them saying at the end, “We came into the world like brother and brother; Now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other.” But I’d like to go to Syracuse or Ephesus or wherever it was, and find out if it’s really like that.’

‘I think it’d be a good idea to find out where it is first,’ I said gently. ‘There’s an atlas on the shelf over there, and an encyclopaedia. Why don’t you look it up?’

He yawned. ‘Later. I’m really tired now, and I’m hurting all over. I just want to go and lie down for a bit.’

‘Understood. Do you want a hand with your suitcase?’

‘Thanks, if you don’t mind.’ Sir Andrew didn’t say anything else until he’d found his room and clambered into bed, at which he glanced up and asked sleepily, ‘Malvolio, what are _you_ planning to do next?’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ I admitted. ‘I just don’t want to go back.’

‘Well – do you want to come with me? I mean, I know we hate each other, but it’s no fun travelling alone.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘And I don’t hate you any more. I don’t _like_ you, you understand, but I might be able to put up with you.’

‘Okay. I can put up with you, too.’ He fell asleep, and began snoring, with a high-pitched nasal whine.

I returned to my own room, wondering why I had agreed even to consider travelling around the world with a monolingual drifter. It was hard to explain, except that I didn’t want to be proudly aloof and alone any more, now that I’d found out what being utterly alone feels like. It had something to do with the brothers in the play Sir Andrew had quoted, and something to do with the reclusive weaver in the story I’d been reading, wanting to adopt the baby who’d crawled into his cottage out of the snow, because ‘It’s a lone thing, and I’m a lone thing.’ Admittedly, adopting a whiny, petulant twit on a permanent gap year was going to be a lot more complicated than adopting a golden-haired orphan child, but, after all, somebody needed to keep an eye on him. At any rate, before we left Illyria, I was definitely going to buy my own copy of _Silas Marner_.

It might help me to stay sane.


End file.
